Modern life doesn’t work

l think that I am saying we have access to enrichment and recreation that we didn't have before and you are saying you think some people choose to do too much of it and are therefore massively overstretched. Our life (as in in my house) isn't frenetic in the way you describe.

Is it actually enrichment though? Kids have access to hobbies and activities like never before but then you have families rushing from work to pick kids up to do dancing, gymnastics, sports etc every other night of the week. Meals grabbed on the go, homework rushed because you can’t not do it. Everyone knackered, no time to just be a bit bored at home.

Adults getting up at 6.00 to go to the gym or fit in a run before getting kids up for school and it all starts over again. We don’t need every minute of our day filled with activity, no matter how purposeful or enriching it might be.

Try being autistic and having burnout/cfs and then try to navigate this life. I have a buffer of a year or two and then I'm finished if I don't recover.

Because as bad as capitalism is it’s better than the alternatives.

you’re in a big house and maybe you should downsize. A house is meant to be a home it shouldn’t be adding more stress to your life. Even if you got a smaller garden you’ll feel less pressured.

the problem with modern life, especially for women, is the lies we’re told. You can have it all, a family & career, whilst making working moms feel bad when they can’t attend every school play, the lack sympathy of employers when the kids are sick and just want their mom, The importance of a 2 parent family is down played, the picture perfect life, the stupid gift boxes parents are under pressure to buy not just for birthday or Christmas’s but now Easter and Valentine’s Day. It’s ridiculous, when was getting a chocolate egg not deemed enough. You can blame capitalism for the emergence of such flamboyant spending but where’s the collective responsibility of having our own mind. If more parents refused to interact with it publicly the less parents who would buy into it. Sorry I’ve gone on a rant there myself 🤣

But the brain and body have evolved for working on daily survival tasks. It may not be logical to you but it's still true.

I think that's a bit of a simplistic take on that subject. As PPs have pointed out, women fall behind in their careers and are financially disadvantaged in a way that's difficult to come back from if they take time out to be SAHM. And running any sort of average household in those circumstances requires two incomes.

This leads us towards only the "rich" having children, and declines in birth rates requiring imported labour or potentially state incentives to reproduce which still negatively impact women. All of which have various and often less than ideal consequences.

As Ellen Goodman wrote some years ago: “Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for—in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.”

I don't know what the solution is. We don't have a car ourselves and our biggest expenses are the mortgage, council tax and energy bills, so we couldn't save a huge amount by being less materialistic. And the UK as a whole needs to improve its rundown public services, although that's easier said than done when the Treasury is short of money.

when you see the cost of childcare, Let's not pretend it's not a choice to have 2 full time working parents at the same time.

People who really struggle financially have to juggle so the children are with 1 parent at all time. It's not great, don't get me wrong, but when 2 adults decide to have a 9 to 5 Monday to Friday kind of job, each, it's a choice.

Not me. I walk or use the bus where possible but I would be very reluctant to give up the independence my car gives me.

. I have two children of different genders so they need their own room as they are nearly teens.

Though, whole households slept together in one big room for hundreds of years. Is separate rooms for everyone this just a modern expectation?

I do think it's a real shame that nowadays households often require two full time wages, so children are in childcare for long hours. Everything I've read on attachment says they should be with a primary caregiver until at least 2.5. It's a shame this is no longer an option for so many.

It seems to work a lot better than early stage capitalism.

Recently without a car for a week, I could cycle to work safely, which took 40 mins each way.
I needed a taxi to get ds to the school bus stop. £20 a day. He walked home which took an hour.
At the weekend we walked into town (4 miles) and carried shopping home in rucksacks. An hour each way.
Without a car and if I was on my own I could survive, but not with a child.

Depends on whether there’s a safe walking route or not.

I live about a mile from the nearest railway station. There’s absolutely no way I’m going to walk up a busy national speed limit road with no pavements, particularly after dark with no street lighting.

While I understand and agree to an extent with this analysis, we were literally sold and encouraged to buy into these "expectations" so now that things are unravelling it's not surprising people are bucking against it all.

Most people believe work hard - reap the benefits, serving themselves and by extension the wider community. It feels like being handed an ice cream as a kid, then being slapoed upside the head for enjoying it, and being told it's your own fault for doing so, and good luck with being allowed another one because the ice cream providers have ring fenced them away from the majority.

Loss of trust in pretty much everything and every body is a horrible side effect of this, the sudden realusation that we were stupid enough to take things on trust.

My childhood was basic, my grandmother didn't have a fridge till we moved in with her in the mid 80s and rented a TV from Radio Rentals. I've seen a mangle working in her kitchen. She started in service at 14 and did her best given the sex based restrictions on her ability to improve her life that have only relatively recently enjoyed.

Most people don't want "much" apart from stability and quality family life, but this is "not enough" any more. Always the grind, the side hustle, the anxiety that less than 1000% commitment to every aspect of life will result in domestic implosion ( which women still bear the brunt of, to a karge extent).

I think it's perfectly possible to appreciate the gains, but also see the flaws in modern life.

Yep. Not in a million years could DH and I do without a car. (Though we have only ever had one between us and I have never owned my own in 35 years of driving.)

No public transport in our village, and car or taxi is the only option. You could cycle, but it's 4 miles downhill to town (fine,) then 4 miles uphill back. Some people wouldn't be fit enough/healthy enough to cycle everywhere anyway.

Getting your weekly shopping and carrying it back would be impossible. Online food shopping is fine, but we buy stuff from about 10 different shops in town on a regular basis. Iceland, Boots, B & M, Morrisons, Aldi, Lidl, Savers, the post office, Tesco, then we go to the doctors, Specsavers, the dentist, the builders merchants, the haberdashery, and a few other places... 'Online shopping' is no help the majority of the time.

No buses to anywhere out of the little market town .. Just a few buses from one side to the other. Fuck-all else ... No train station for 15 miles.

We wouldn't be able to do anything with no car. We're never giving it up. Not ever.

I didn't say we don't need cars but limit them. How many people jump into a car for journeys less than a mile?

It’s easy to say “too many cars” but the reason people need those cars is due to the way cities and towns have been planned and built - for many it is impossible to live their lives without a car because things are not walkable to anymore. I agree though that this is a huge problem and our sedentary lives are causing huge mental and physical health problems. I just don’t think we can blame individuals for that.

@MargoLivebetter
i agree

modern life has just this morning has let us
check real time real cancellations for eldest young to college and check very local weather to know if raincoats required
youngster cycled in, in lightweight waterproofs (modern materials) on a safe cycle path
they both have phones in their pocket if the need to contact us
they are in decent school/college with interesting lessons, fun friends, personal development tutorials, great facilities, extra circular activities which keep them fit and they enjoy, with brilliant teachers who want them to reach their potential

and as long as they are fine we are fine

even the excruciating conversations about how to not think anal sex is to be expected can be quite entertaining - the dark side of modern life with their potential access to extreme porn

but we are parents it’s our job to at the very least contribute, if not entirely ensure that their morals and mental health remain robust - we did sign up for this it’s quite easy to choose not to have a child nowadays (the nobody is interested in your knob (dic pics) one was also funny they were horrified essentially)

I'm so interested in this thread. Human experience over time is trying new things, leaving old things and then picking up the old things and trying them again, maybe with a bit of spin.

This kind of "things were better before" thinking reminds me of when I was listening to Dr Rangan Chatterjee (whose podcast I do enjoy listening to as a rule) and he said "oh, it used to be that a matriarch would cook nutritious food for everyone from scratch and we don't have that anymore". I don't think he meant it the way it sounded, but it gave me the absolute rage because (a) yes, that is a really important piece of family work which, like many other types of "women's work" has been consistently valued at nil compared to anything that men do (including professional cheffing for posh people for stupid money) and (b) there's absolutely no need for it to be something that a woman does for a family as opposed to a man.

I think I'm going off topic somewhat but I'm very glad to have got that out of my system a year or so after the event...

An amazing summary.

"late stage capitalism"!!

You are free to sell your excessively big house and go and live in Socialist paradise of Venezuela where large parts of the population have no house and are starving.

Or stay here and continue to bitch about what you do have that many would love. Your choices....

I think life is always a bit fucked but I'd rather be alive now than at any other time. Here's why:

I eat better than most King's & Queens did previously
I have access to healthcare that is free at the point of delivery (albeit far from perfect)
My children were educated to 18 for free at the point of delivery
I didn't have to remain married to my abusive ex-husband
As a single mum I haven't been ostracized or vilified (at least not to my face)
I have been able to work and whilst childcare was expensive and very stressful at times, it was at least an option
I have a hot shower available every day
I have heating in my home that is clean and easy to turn on
I can access the knowledge of the entire globe and human history at the click of a button
I have the most amazing array of entertainment available in my own home
I can move from point A to point B in a heated tin box on wheels at my own convenience on fairly well maintained roads
I can easily keep in touch with family and friends all over the world
Depending on my budget, I have opportunities to travel the 4 corners of the globe
I can work from home part of the time
I can get almost anything delivered directly to my home

When I compare my life to that of my grandmothers who were born around 1900, I know whose life I would rather have. Even compared to my own mother, I still know whose life I'd rather have. We have so many more choices these days.

@DeluluTaylor sorry to hear you are having a crap time at the moment, but maybe you need to have a think about your choice to be in a huge house. Perhaps the affordability of it is impacting other choices that might lead to more contentment and better quality of life.

that is so very true

Absolutely. Obviously, our problems feel big relative to where we are, and I'm not suggesting that they're trivial. I'm very overweight, for example (though not as yet unfit or ill as a result), and that is a thing that makes me very unhappy for all the usual reasons - and it's not a thing that I would have experienced 200 years ago. But it's possible to say "here are some things we did in the past that we left behind that actually it turns out we should have continued to do" (such as eating whole foods cooked from scratch, or continuing to maintain a level of physical activity after it ceased being specifically necessary to carry out essential that are now obsolete or automated or much easier due to advances in technology) without succumbing to a very idealised idea of what it was actually like generally to be a peasant or working-class person 200 years ago.

I do think moving away is the answer. Cornwall is a beautiful area so it will always attract those with money. This means house prices will always be high. Unfortunately job prospects also be poor due to the nature of the area. Again, I think there is a bit of expectations management that needs to happen for people lucky enough to live in these types of areas.

I live in one myself but have told my children that they will need to go elsewhere to build a career and make some money. It's impossible here! I don't think that's necessarily unfair though. We don't have a monopoly on this area. It is objectively lovely and I think that people who have earned enough to buy a house here should be able to do so. I don't think you can restrict everyone else from living here whilst asking them to subsidise my kids to live here.